Let’s talk about the civilians dying in Syria

While recent violence in Eastern Ghouta has made international headlines throughout the first months of 2018, it has not been the only display of force by the Syrian regime.

Screenshot from the @syrianpresidency instagram account.Recently
an Instagram account posted a photo of a soldier, his back to the
photographer, pointing a gun to the sky. He is in the center of the
dimly lit frame, as he looks out over a darkening vista and a setting
sun. The caption: “Safe
weekend...by you... for you... and for all Syrians”.
Then come a handful of hashtags, #honor, #brave, #EasternGhouta.

The
photo belongs to an Instagram account with over 100.000 followers. It
has images accompanied by hashtags such as #photooftheday,
#instagood, #mondayblues #goodmorning, and even #throwbackthursday,
but it is not curated by the usual millennial. The account holds the
handle @syrianpresidency and belongs to Bashar Al-Assad. Mostly, it
exhibits photos of the president himself and first lady Asma Al-Assad
taking care of their daily duties. Asma appears as an empathic first
lady and mother figure as well as a style icon. Bashar follows suit.
When not captured in an interview situation or signing a document, he
is walking hand in hand with his wife, posing with Syrian kids or
writing autographs on the shirts of the national football team.

While
other major actors in the Syrian conflict, such as ISIS, have been
shut down multiple times due to posting disturbing content,
@syrianpresidency sticks to social media etiquette by exhibiting
pleasant photos and catchy hashtags and has thus been updated
regularly since 2013. Operating behind a guise of transparency,
Bashar al-Assad and his regime are portrayed as just crusaders,
determined to lead their population to safety, as a quote
accompanying one of the pictures outlines: “When a ship is in the
eye of the storm, the captain doesn't jump but rather faces the
dangers to steer the ship back to safer shores.”

The
UK-based NGO Syrian Network for Human Rights is one of few widely
quoted NGOs monitoring the Syrian war. At times referenced by the UN,
the network lists Syrian regime forces and Iranian militias as
accountable for more than 90% of the killings in the Syrian conflict.
A conflict that according to them has claimed more than 217.000
civilian lives. In February alone, 1389 people were left dead. 67% of
these were killed by regime forces in Al Ghouta, according to the
network.

The
violence in Syria is undoubtedly complex and nuanced, with many
different actors and agendas involved over the years. This makes it
difficult to grasp the toll the war has taken so far, especially on
civilian populations. Since ISIS has been weakened, swinging the
momentum of the battle in Assad’s favor, civilians in Syria are now
left with a regime whose declared mission is to re-establish absolute
control over the country by seizing territory and defeating any
remaining rebel groups. Trying to understand why recent months have
been amongst the most devastating for civilians during the whole
Syrian conflict, despite a significantly weakened ISIS, is a
difficult road to go down - one with many questions.

Aarhus,
Denmark

We’re
meeting Nagieb Khaja at a café right next to the train station. As
we arrive, two other journalists are finishing an interview with him
- taking a few pictures and saying thank you for your time. The look
on Nagieb’s face is hard to decipher. Perhaps working in Syria has
made interviews in Denmark trivial. Probably. It looks like the other
journalists bought him a coffee, and we decide to do the same.

Thousands of innocent people have had to suffer for the sake of a few

Nagieb
is in Aarhus to talk at a conference about his work in Syria, where
he has been several times since 2011. The Danish journalist,
film-maker and author is internationally admired for having both the
contacts and the courage to embed himself with the Taliban in
Afghanistan and with foreign fighters in Syria. As with Afghanistan,
he explains, his goal in Syria has been to bring new perspective into
the coverage of the war. To tell the stories that are not being told.

“During
the Syrian conflict we’ve had a very disproportionate focus on IS…
the Syrian government has been behind the vast majority of civilian
killings.”, Khaja notes. “The reason is that the Syrian
government is not a direct threat to western security, and IS, you
know, is a direct threat.”

Amongst
journalists and editors it is well-known that the closer a topic is
to its audience, the more interested the audience will be in the
topic. In recent years, ISIS has claimed responsibility for terror
incidents in the Middle East, but also for attacks in Europe. Thus
the narrative that we in the west are in a war against terror has
been easy to transfer to the Syrian conflict, something that might
have skewed the public understanding of who’s responsible for what.
Nagieb makes the point, that the proximity of ISIS for western
audience might help to explain the unbalanced focus on ISIS during
the Syrian conflict by western media, despite data documenting how
the Syrian regime is responsible for most suffering. We prompt Nagieb
to elaborate his point, and he says that the Syrian conflict is
permeated by lopsided understandings such as this.

Back
in late 2015 when Nagieb was in Syria the last time, he travelled
through Aleppo, Idlib and other areas labelled by the Syrian
government as “rebel-held”. A dangerous job, but one that exposed
him to the puzzling realization that in many of the places, where
recent bombings had occurred, he was only meeting civilians. Lots of
civilians. Many of them told him the same: “Who are they calling
terrorists? It’s a market. There are women here, and kids walking
to school.”

Determining
whether these testimonies are true - that some bombed areas had no
rebels and only civilians - is impossible. It’s word against word.
But the large number of civilian deaths in different cases of the
conflict, including currently in Eastern Ghouta, raises questions
about the necessity of this suffering. Thousands of innocent people
have had to suffer for the sake of a few.

In
the social sciences, there are theories that attempt to investigate
reasons why governments target their own populations. In his widely
acclaimed analysis of state-building in the ‘third world’, the
international relations scholar Mohammed Ayoob makes the case for a
nuanced view on human rights violations in relatively new states that
are establishing themselves after colonial oppression. His theory,
which he calls ‘subaltern realism’, argues that these fragile
nations need room for “state-building” in order to consolidate
their power, which is a polite way of opening the door for a certain
extent of state-inflicted violence.

Ayoob
stresses that there are boundaries to the type of violence states
need to deal out to achieve their goals, but that these lines are
hard to define. We weren’t satisfied with this explanation of the
actions of the Syrian regime, but when we dug deeper into the
literature, we did find a concept that resonated: the concept of
state terrorism.

Eastern
Ghouta, Syria

While
recent violence in Eastern Ghouta has made international headlines
throughout the first months of 2018, it has not been the only display
of force by the Syrian regime. Living in Syria and looking at the
conflict from the academic lens of international relations, author
and commentator Christopher Phillips has become well-versed on the
socio-political interplays of the region. His work has been published
in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and he has appeared on
various BBC programmes. In an excerpt from his book “the Battle for
Syria,” it is outlined how Assad’s army set a precedent early on
for how it would react to citizens taking to the streets:

“The regime deployed cynical
and brutal tactics. Agents provocateurs were placed among peaceful
protesters to fire at regime troops, allowing them to justify
replying with lethal force. In some cases the regime’s secret
police, the mukhabarat, were placed within military and security
units to threaten execution if soldiers refused to fire on civilians.
False reports were delivered to Syria’s religious minority groups,
claiming that the protesters, who were mostly from the 65% of the
population who were Sunni Muslim Arabs, were Islamist radicals
determined to slaughter them, which scared many into backing Assad.
Tens of thousands were arrested and tortured, while female protesters
reported sexual assault by regime thugs, the shabiha.”

According
to Philips’ analysis, from the beginning of the conflict the regime
sought to dismantle the Syrian societal fabric as a means to maintain
power and quell rebellion. It did so by turning groups against each
other based on ill-founded fears. In response to this, civilian
militias eventually formed to protect protesters. When thousands of
Assad’s military members defected and joined civilian militias in
the late summer of 2011, the strength and organization of the
opposition grew. The civil war would begin soon after. The tendril of
hope provided by the Arab spring has become smoking rubble and killed
voices, and has been responded to by a regime that seems to go above
and beyond in its attempt to reinstate order.

Amsterdam,
The Netherlands

As
the world was getting ready to crash into a new millennium with the
binary apocalypse coined Y2K, Egyptian born political scientist and
journalist Ibrahim Helal was getting ready to go to work.
Transferring from BBC Arabic to the still fresh Al Jazeera, Helal
would soon spend most of his waking hours at the headquarters in
Doha, Qatar, helping the network to establish itself as
counter-weight to western media. In those years, the network became
internationally known for being the only in the world covering the
war in Afghanistan live and on location. Ibrahim Helal ran the
editorial line.

The perception of terrorism that we - the western public - have developed today is one that is mostly concentrated on individual acts of violence

We
met Ibrahim late last year at the News
Xchange conference in Amsterdam. News Xchange is the largest annual
conference on news journalism in the world, where a blend of
journalists, researchers and other people involved in the industry
meet and talk news. Not the actual news, but how to do them. Helal
was invited to join a panel in a debate discussing the concept of
terrorism and how to cover it.

From
the start of the session, it became clear that Helal is the one to
ask, if you want a strong opinion about the coverage of terrorism. An
outsider’s opinion, one might say, and an opinion backed by
practice. Just like Nagieb Khaja, he believes that actually being
where the situation unfolds enables one to communicate with context.
In publishing stories about terrorism on western soil next to stories
about the Syrian civil war, he feels that context somehow got lost:

“They
[western media] ignore the different kinds of terrorism and terrorist
attacks, especially in the Middle East. Because of a lack of context,
they don’t know exactly what happens. Some attacks, they just say
are “explosions”, “bombings”, “bloodiest days”, without
saying “terrorism”.

Examining
linguistics, the myth that terrorism is exclusively the activity of
non-governmental forces is ironic. The actual word “terrorism” is
derived from the French “terrorisme” referring to the systemic
employment of violence and the use of the guillotine by the Jacobin
and Thermidorian regimes in France, which gained their time period
the title of the “reign of terror”. While
the general debate about the exact definition of terrorism is
ongoing, most experts interpret it to include two viable elements:
That the act is politically motivated (this includes ideological
motivations) and that the victims of the act matter, as well as the
wider audience.

The
perception of terrorism that we - the western public - have developed
today is one that is mostly concentrated on individual acts of
violence. A bombing, a shooting, a religious extremist, a madman.
These are the events and the characters shaped by the media,
politicians, and our own identifications in the west of what we
consider to be a threat; of what we consider to be an act of
terrorism, or a terrorist. However, academic research allows us to
challenge this arguably one-sided perspective.

Various
scholars emphasize the fact that there is not only one type of
terrorism. The concept of terrorism is rather a wider concept with
varying courses of action, carried out by different actors for
different purposes. One of these branches is state terrorism. In
American academic Michael Stohl’s definition, state terrorism is
enacted by regimes in
order to “create or enforce obedience, either of the population at
large or within the ruling party.” Other definitions also include
the distinction that state terrorism is intended to create fear and
force individuals within the targeted population to behave in a
certain way. Whereas the concept of state terrorism itself is not
regarded in international law as illegal, actions associated with it,
in many cases, are. Targeting and killing civilians for example is
considered to be a war crime, as is the use of chemical weapons.

When
we spoke with him, Ibrahim spoke in his own words about the
misunderstandings of terrorism, and how it could relate to the state:
“If you go back to the academic description of terrorism, it’s a
violence or threat of violence in order to achieve religious,
ideological or political aim,” he told us.

“This
is exactly what the Syrian government is doing to their people. When
the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons against their own people,
it’s not to kill their own people, it’s to terrify them, to move
them to do something different – which is a typical identification
of terrorism. However, nobody cares to say ‘terrorist regime’,
they cannot say it. Only less than 2% [of civilians] were killed by
ISIS. But everyone believes that ISIS are the terrorists, not the
regime.”

Instagram

Screenshot from the @syrianpresidency instagram accountOne
of the recent instagram posts on @syrianpresidency is a photo of
Bashar al-Assad, in a tailored blue suit and a muted blue-grey tie.
The frame catches the president of Syria in motion. He is looking
away from the camera, his index finger extended, as if making a
point. He could be in mid-speech. The caption of this photo speaks
for itself. “The war on terrorism will not stop as long as there is
one terrorist desecrating the sanctity of Syrian soil. And at the
same time, we will continue to fight against all the western
scenarios that want to break the unity and sovereignty of our
country”. The captain will not abandon his ship, no matter how many
are drowning.

About the authors

Kylee Pedersen is completing the Erasmus Mundus Masters degree in Journalism and currently based in Denmark. Kylee is a Canadian freelance journalist interested in issues affecting marginalized communities, at the intersections of politics, the economy and culture. You can reach her on twitter @kyleepedersen

Jens Renner is completing the Erasmus Mundus Masters degree in Journalism and currently based in Denmark. Jens is a Danish/German freelance journalist with a background in religious, globalization and development studies. You can reach him on twitter @renner_jens

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